Vim Updates

After my last post I attempted to go through my vimrc and move as much as I felt I really could (for now) to my gvimrc. I supposed it does make sense to have it both ways (see my previous post). I mean it would obviously be easier to only have to transfer one file to every computer you work on instead of two. But then on the other hand it does make a lot of sense to divide up your rc file; one for each program.

Given that I realized I had not updated my vimrc, or my gvimrc, in for ever. I didn’t even know my gvimrc link was dead. Thanks for heads up</sarcasm>. Anyway, my vim page is up to date now so you gleefully enjoy all the vim goodness that resides there.

As note, before you click all the wonderful links, I post all of my rc files and such through Google Docs. While this isn’t the ideal solution its free. So thats why I’m the only guy on the internet who tells you what kind of line endings his files have. There are free tools on the internet to convert them if you need too.

Enjoy the Penguins!

A thought about vimrc’s

Paludis 0.30.0 is out!

Well, make that multiple thoughts actually. Despite this post following a Q&A format, there aren’t really many answers following.

Q1.) What kind of security risks can you potentially have because of your vimrc?

Q2.) What goes in your gvimrc as opposed to your vimrc and does it matter?

A1.) Now. I do not claim to any sort of expertise what so ever in security of any kind. To perfectly honest with you 99% of the time its the least of my concern. As long as my wireless router is encrypted and other trivial (yet potentially life (finacanlly speaking) saving measures) matters are dealt with I forget security is ever even an issue and continue life as usal. Which is probably very similar to how your average Joe runs his computer world too. “I have my Windows Updates, I’m secure enough.”

What brings this is on is a series of scripts I found today for Vim. One of which asks you to put your logon names and passwords to servers in your vimrc. The point of which is so that vim can login to your database, and then download the list of tables which is then used for autocomplete. It actually works really well, but after I implemented it, it occured to me vunerable I felt. I never reallly considered my vimrc secure, much less the rest of my harddrive. Even I know one of the first rules of computer security is you shouldn’t really be writing down your user name and passwords. So keeping a huge list of database usernames and passwords in my vimrc doesn’t sound safe. What do you think?

A2.) I’ve never really seen and documentation regarding what excatly goes in what. A lot of times you can stick everything in both or either and achevie the same effect. On rare occassions I have found myself stumped though. Pouring over documentation and checking my code again and again and again only to find out that it needed to go in the other. Hence my current two line gvimrc. So while I was working on my gvimrc for my Mac tonight I had to go to the net to remind myself how to set the window size when I stumbled upon a sample gvimrc that had all kinds of stuff in it. Things like no toolbars, no scrollbars, gui font. Stuff that everyone I know puts in their vimrc. So the question begs really, why have both if you only need one? And if you need both, why does a majority of stuff work in both instead of one or the other? Something doesn’t feel right to me there.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Good Free Open Source Software for your Mac

Because I’m not as hardcore open source as Stallman that I only use hardware and software that is open source I have an Apple laptop and I use OS X on it. I, to be frank, I have no qualms with my Mac. It is light weight, feels like it is of good build quality, and to be honest OS X does what I want it to do. Nothing more, nothing less really. Hell, the kernel is open source (some of it anyway), and there is plenty of open source software for it that I like better than they’re Linux alternatives in many cases. Something I never really thought I’d say, but oh well…

Chat Client

Adium – Its like Gaim, in fact it uses Gaim’s back end, the only thing is though, its better than Gaim in my opinion. Its prettier, runs quicker than Gaim does on my Linux box, and that pretty much sums it up.

IRC

Colloquy – I can’t pronounce it, but I like it. Its pretty (notice a trend?). And it functions exactly the way I want it too. Mac software, for all the reasons you might hate it, much akin to its closed source cousin Windows, all tends to follow the same usage and ui patterns. Something I’ve been wishing Linux would do since I started using it.

Text Editor

MacVim – Its like Vim, only native Mac. Can’t go wrong there. I keep running into things that won’t work out my vimrc (which I need to update badly, sorry) but other than that, you can’t really go wrong here. And as far as I can tell the guy doing the brunt of the work here is super nice and willing to at least discuss your suggestions if not attempt to implement them.

Office

OpenOffice.org – For now anyway. There are more open source alternatives that use the truly open source parts of OO.org and rewrite the rest from scratch, under an open source license of course, but I haven’t tried any of them yet and can’t, in good faith, recommend them to someone else. If you not a die hard though, MS Office is the still the best thing going for your term paper. Sorry, but its true.

Mail

Thunderbird – Yeah, Apple parades their mail program around like its the greatest thing since sliced bread, and it is okay, but its okay at best.

Web Browser

Firefox – No surprise. I’ve tried a lot of browsers in my day. From the CLI only to the latest and greatest. You name it, odds are I’ve tried it. That includes the new Chrome browser from Google. Despite it all though Firefox still reigns king my book, regardless of platform.

That pretty much sums it up. I don’t think I really use any other software on my Mac on regular basis. Sometimes I fire up Xcode (close source) but even it relies on GCC (open source). So if you count that than so be it. Other than that, enjoy the whatever Mac’s little mascots are.

Enjoy the Penguins!